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* * *

Tom woke up with the phone ringing, and a panicked Notty digging needle-sharp claws into his underarm, where he'd been nestling.

"Ow," he said, grabbing the furry body blindly in his right hand, then looking for the phone on the bedside table with his left. One of the good things of this split sleeping schedule was that he got the bed when Kyrie wasn't here. And her pillow still smelled like her, too.

"Yeah," he said, turning on the phone, and fully expecting it to be Kyrie telling him about some emergency at the diner. Before he heard any sound from the other side of the phone, he'd already covered the possibles in his mind. She might have run out of paper napkins. Or it could be the beef. Did he order more beef? Perhaps it was the dishwasher flaking again. They needed to buy a new one soon. "Yeah?"

"Oh, damn," Rafiel's voice. "Damn, damn, damn."

Tom sat up, setting Notty down beside him on the bed. "What?" His relations with Rafiel had been less than cordial at one point, but even back then, Rafiel had never called him for the purpose of cursing at him.

"Tom?" Rafiel said, as if surprised to hear him.

"You called me."

There was a silence on the other side, a silence during which Rafiel seemed to be taking several deep breaths. "Oh, shit, Tom, we're in so much trouble."

"What happened?" Tom said, jumping out of the bed and looking around for his clothes. He'd showered before going to bed, so he could probably skip it this time. Truth be told he had a shower problem—he enjoyed so much being able to shower when he pleased that he had a lot of showers even when not shifting back and forth. Unfortunately they did not have support groups for the hygiene-dependent. "Rafiel, what happened?" he repeated when no answer came.

"We found . . . a corpse," Rafiel's voice was distant, like he was holding the phone away from his mouth, or perhaps speaking in a tiny voice. "Just outside the diner. I'm calling you while McKnight is talking to Kyrie."

"Outside the diner!" Tom said. "In the parking lot again?"

"No, corner of Pride and Fairfax. By the lamppost. She was . . . propped up. Leaning against the post . . ."

"She?" Tom's mind went immediately to the woman whom Rafiel had found, the woman who was a mouse shifter.

"The . . . Summer Avenir. The reporter for the paper? The one that Keith talked to or brought in?"

"The one that published dragon pictures?"

"Yeah, we're going to have to talk to Conan. And the . . . whoever the triad members are in this area."

"She was killed by a dragon?" Tom asked.

"Well, she was killed by something with really big teeth," Rafiel said, in the tone of a man who has come to his rope's end and still has quite a bit to climb. "And then she was propped up. This is putting a damper on our normal story of attacks by wild animals, you know? It's clear"—he took a deep breath—"very clear it was one of us." He lowered his voice. "I can smell shifter all over the scene, still. I thought I'd seen Dire before, but . . . I don't know."

Tom moaned and dropped onto the bed, to put his socks on. His feet and in fact all his wounds from the encounter with the dire wolf were completely healed and the very faint scars would soon vanish. "We must make sure he stops."

"Who?" Rafiel said.

"Dire."

"Uh . . . yeah. I'd say that's a given. The question is how."

"I don't know," Tom said.

"You could"—Rafiel cleared his throat—"talk to the Great Sky Dragon."

Tom stopped, his hand on his sock, his mouth on the verge of uttering an absolute no. Instead, he took a deep breath. "You must see we can't, Rafiel. You must see we can't."

"Why not? If they are rival organizations, both ancient, why can't you talk to the Great Sky Dragon and make him deal with Dire? I mean, I know that Dire said he had a non-aggression pact with the triad, but it doesn't seem to me as if that pact is much good. How could it be? Otherwise he wouldn't have gone through all that trouble to make sure the triad knew he didn't intend to kill you."

Tom heard himself make a sound that was half annoyance and half anger. "I still can't ask for their help, Rafiel. If we ask for the help of a criminal organization, how can we, in the future, hold ourselves able to stop them? If we ask for the help of an organization that deals in drugs, that kills, that basically seems to view other humans—what did Dire call them?—ephemerals, as mere cattle to be milked, then how can we hope to stand for justice among our kind? Or anywhere?"

There was a long silence. Tom had the impression that Rafiel was running several arguments through his own head and discarding them just as fast as he thought them up. Finally he made a sound somewhere between a huff and a sigh. "Tom, we can't be so pure as the driven snow. I understand what you're saying. And standing for justice is very well—don't get me wrong. I'm as fond of graphic novels as Keith is. And justice and truth and all that, but Tom . . . I'm afraid he's going to kill one of us. I don't even know, you know . . . if he might not have set up the aquarium murders. He's . . . cunning, and he has an . . . odd sense of humor. Look at how he conned Kyrie into going to the house. At any point he could turn and decide to hold one of us—or all of us—responsible for those deaths and just kill us." Pause. "You know, it's quite likely it was him who killed this woman, without so much as a thought."

"Well, she did publish pictures of dragons in the newspaper," Tom said.

"But it could have been Photoshop. I mean, even if she had caught you mid-shifting, do you think that it couldn't be Photoshop? No one will take it seriously. Look at all the pictures of the alien that the tabloids keep following up on and publish. Do you believe he exists?"

"No," Tom said. "And no, I don't think anyone paid undue attention to the pictures. But they are pictures of our kind and . . . well . . . Dire is very old. At least assuming it was him. Though, frankly, the Great Sky Dragon is very old too, and I don't think any of his younger subordinates would have dared point out to him that times have changed."

"No," Rafiel said. "I'm sure they wouldn't. So . . . they killed this young woman. Without a thought. Because she was . . . an ephemeral."

"No, because she was an ephemeral they thought was threatening shifters." Tom found his mind going down the dangerous path that he knew these people's minds must take every time. He said matter of factly, "Think of it from their perspective, how it must have been throughout history. The discovery of a shifter would lead to a hunt for others. Death was always the end. Of course they would kill anyone that was a remote threat."

"Of course? You sound as if you approve."

"No. Understanding is not approving. There is a qualitative difference." He felt suddenly very tired. "You know, when I was on the streets, they had all these programs where you were supposed to mingle with the other runaways and empathize and understand them. Sometimes that's what you had to do for a meal. And the counselors always seemed to think that if you understood someone, you'd like them . . . and you know? It's not true. Sometimes the more you talk to a teenage habitual liar and drug pusher, the less you like them. But . . . but I do understand how they got to be the way they are. And at the same time . . ." He took a deep breath. "I understand how we could go that way. From the best of motives. Protecting ourselves and our friends. I understand how we could start deciding that . . . killing the occasional ephemeral meant nothing. Or even that we should kill a few every now and then, out of the blue, to keep the other ones in fear. I understand them, Rafiel. And it scares me. That's another reason not to ask for the Great Sky Dragon's help. That, and I'd like to continue being able to call my soul my own."

Rafiel huffed again and when he answered he was peevish. "Very well," he said, in a tone that implied it wasn't very well at all. "But I hope you know what to do, because this can't go on. With the deaths at the aquarium—and by the way, the latest one, Joe Buckley, had water in his lungs, so it wasn't a body disposal, it was murder by shark—and now some mysterious animal going around town killing people, not to mention what my colleagues are convinced is some madman who just propped up the body afterwards . . ." This time the sound was just a sigh. "I don't know how to cover up all of this, Tom. I just don't. And I'm an officer of the law. The killings must stop. And I think there's more than an even chance that it's all Dire. I'm . . . following up on it, but I really think there's a good chance he came to town before, you know, when they felt the deaths, and he set all this up. And we must stop him."

"I understand," Tom said and he did, and in this case he could even empathize. "I'll think of something. Look, I'll come down and help you talk to Conan, okay?"

After Rafiel hung up, Tom started tying his boots, a task made more complex by the fact that Notty was trying to help. "I'd better think of something, eh, Notty?" he said, as he petted the little round kitten head. "Or we are in deep, deep trouble."

Notty looked up at him with guileless intensely blue eyes that seemed to say he had every confidence in Tom's ability to make it all right. Tom wished he did too.

 

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Framed